Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / She made 6 figures in 3 months by launching a data-driven product to market, Meagan Pate shares her journey so far with STRAAND (Part 1)

Transcript

She made 6 figures in 3 months by launching a data-driven product to market, Meagan Pate shares her journey so far with STRAAND (Part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

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This is Megan Pate for Female Startup Club. Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today's episode is sponsored by The Donut, a 100% free newsletter committed to making the news more enjoyable. Sign up today at thedonut.co forward slash hype.
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And if you're new here, hi, I'm Dune, your host and hype girl in business. Every week we learn from seven, eight, and nine-figure female founders to understand their blueprint in business when it comes to money, marketing, and mistakes. Women like Megan Pate, the Aussie founder, shaking up scalp care.
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Megan spent her teen years trying every home remedy for dandruff that she could find, and she'd often cancel her plans over her flaky scalp. A light bulb moment. In 2020, she met her now co-founders and started working on launching Strand to the market. And it has been a bit of a whirlwind since then.
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This episode is packed with so many gems. You are absolutely going to love Megan's story. And while I've got you here, remember that you can access our doc for every single grant that's currently live around the world right now for female founders. You can get the list at femalestartupclub.com forward slash grants. Okay, let's jump into today's episode. This is Megan for Female Startup Club.
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Megan, hi, welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Hi, I'm so excited to be here.
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I'm so excited to be here too after just seeing you yesterday. Love that for us. I know. How serendipitous. How serendipitous indeed. For everyone listening, we were meeting in real life yesterday because Megan was hosting a beautiful event at a beautiful house in Sydney and you're back in Melbourne now. And we're going to talk about the event, but maybe a little bit later when we get into kind of marketing and launch stuff and activations.
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but I love this for us. It was nice to meet in real life. I've missed those interactions. It really is. And I think that's why I'm so excited that events are back, activations are back, because you really get to experience such, I guess, more meaningful relationships and like that warmth. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I feel like we're all kind of
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a little bit exhausted from the Zooms and the calls and we're, you know, kind of seeking out RIL activations or events or catch-ups so we can kind of get back into the offline world. For anyone who might not know yet who you are, how do you like to introduce yourself?
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Oh, that one's always a tricky one, isn't it? It's like, what do you do? A bit of everything. But formerly the co-founder and general manager of Strand and Strand's a scout care range that was recently launched around seven months ago.
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In Australia, we've launched my D2C and a key retailer, Adore Beauty, and we're just launching in the US at the moment and UK, EU, and working through some of our Southeast Asia and China plans. So we're very busy and that's what kind of keeps me awake at night. The global girl. Let's hope so.
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Very global. What were you doing before you started Strand? So earlier on in my career, actually my first proper job, I was a makeup artist. So I worked at Mac when I was 16 for quite a few years. And then I went into publishing advertising. So I worked in the commercial departments for brands like Elle, Harper's, Cosmo at Bauer for quite some time, and then over at News Corp for Vogue, Vogue Living.
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GQ and then I spent some time actually advising for beauty brands and doing more brand strategic work, but very much in the commercial and creative space. So what does a brand look like? Where does it fit? The R&D is there space for it? And as part of that, I also have become really heavily involved in another brand called Three Warriors, which is a certified organic self tan, another local one called TBH Skincare.
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So that's been a lot of fun. And then met my co-founders for Strand about two years ago now. And then here we are. Oh, my gosh. And then here we are. Something that I was asking you yesterday and something that I was curious about from an outsider kind of observing what you've done so far is that, you know, you launched seven months ago, but you're already having such great.
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success. You're already launching overseas. You're in these major retailers. You are having these beautiful events. You've just done your first pre-seed raise. And I was asking you, like, but how? And you were saying, you know, there's a lot of work in the years leading up to before you even get to starting the brand, which of course I understand. But I would love to go back to like the meeting of minds, I guess, with you and your co-founders to understand like,
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Was it always scalp care? Were you just meeting and being like, let's start a brand together? Or were you, what was the insight? What was the kind of like, let's do this moment and those early days of discussing a brand? Definitely. It was always scalp care. I don't think it was positioned as scalp care at that stage. It was still quite early on, but two of my business partners, Tim and Jeremy, had done quite a lot of market research into anti-dandruff.
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So with that understanding of the category, that's when I then became involved. And they're like, okay, we think there might be something in anti-dandruff, having really sensitive skin myself,
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there a hundred percent is and then we went through the journey of what actually is this and that's when scalp care um really came forward and our love my love of beauty understanding a lot of beauty consumers particularly from those early years as being a makeup artist it was like that's what was missing is actually a love for a brand and a product that existed in that space so that's where we started the journey and obviously there was a
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a lot more to it. We worked with Nick, who is also a co-founder. So we've really gone through and we've got co-founders who are really great at what they do. And Nick is manufacturing. So he worked in manufacturing for over 25 years in Australia.
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working on formulating and developing some of the biggest brands that Australia has then exported. So when it comes to ingredients, product, market research, understanding, we really, I guess, had a lot of insight to how to build and formulate.
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best product, but also where clinical data was coming from, from a lot of the key ingredient suppliers. So Strand is very, very much based on science, the formulas, then the brand itself, whilst it has that science undertone, is more consumable. Sarah, our fifth,
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co-founder, had previously worked and co-founded brands such as Sand and Sky, which again was, you know, an incredible and is an incredible Australian brand exported overseas. So when it comes to retail and retail conversations, Sarah's very on the pulse there. Right. So it's kind of like
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There are five of you. You each have a very clear lane that you work within and you kind of all work in harmony. I actually have people ask me sometimes, like, how do I find a co-founder? How do you actually find those kind of people? And I'm wondering in your case, you know, it's five people, so that's a nice size of people who have come together. Like, did you...
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Were you like actively looking for a co-founder or had you just met these people through a network and started having conversations and it organically happened? Or how did you actually kind of come together and be like, let's do this together? Were you like cherry picking the best people and being like, let's bring you into the conversation? Or did you just all know each other? You were friends and, you know, it happened around a table kind of thing. No. So there wasn't a friendship previously in Three Warriors, my other business that I work with Corbin, the founder on.
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We also didn't have a friendship previously either. He brought me into his business as an advisor and to do some strategic work. Now we have a really, really beautiful friendship, but that just really helped to understand, you know, boundaries and ways of working, which was fantastic. So he actively was looking for somebody who could do what I do. And I'm like, okay, let's fill this out. And then it became a lot more meaningful. So I became a lot more involved in the business. And similarly with Tim, Sarah, Jeremy and Nick,
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There was perhaps previous friendships through networks of having worked together. You know, Jeremy may have worked with Nick in a previous company or Sarah may have worked with Jeremy. He's really good at bringing people together, but they were actively, I guess, based on skill set and what was needed to make this business, you know, as best it could be. So it's like what's something that is a desirable attribute
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Having worked with friends before, I think you can go into it with the absolute best intention and you can have the best friendship. That doesn't necessarily then translate to a good working relationship. So if this was something that I was looking to say do again, I would always avoid the friendship route because your relationship exists somewhere else, whereas when your relationship is started through business...
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you know how each other operate, you know how you communicate. A lot of the times work I can dot point, bullet points, you know, quite short but not through any other reasons than efficiency and just to get it quickly. In a friendship that might be seen as blunt and then in a friendship I'm so much warmer and, you know, we'll sit and waffle on a phone for two hours if there's time. So that could be a really jarring thing.
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relationship so yeah I think you know again you need to consider what's right for you and what's right for your brand um but I would go into it with as much understanding of what that might mean and if you are going in with friendship with a friend I'd be very I would lay it all out up front even expectations like where do we think this will go what's the exit plan what if something goes wrong and we don't want to be in this anymore what do we then do
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And what's the plan B if one person doesn't want to be in the business anymore or there is a fallout? What's the plan? Like what happens in that case? You know, God forbid it happens, but what does happen? And I think that's a great point to kind of have all the tough conversations. It's kind of like that, you know, those books, they're kind of like silly books that, you know, you're getting married, so these are all the conversations you should ask your partner. It's exactly the same, really. Yeah.
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Oh, and you don't want to have them because you're so excited and you're just so set on a vision that it will succeed. So you don't want to entertain that. So I think that's been a benefit of going into business with people that a business relationship exists because like that's the expectation.
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And there's kind of nothing to lose to a degree in terms of the relationship. Of course, you always want to keep beautiful business relationships, but it's not like a longstanding friendship that you could potentially damage if it doesn't go the way that you both want it to. And when business isn't going well, it's high pressure on everyone. And when it is going well, it's great. But yeah, just something, I guess, to be mindful of.
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Very true. Something we love to talk about, especially early on in the episode, is the money piece and how you kind of get from wherever you started to wherever you are now. And I know that you've just recently raised $2 million in pre-seed investment with Unilever Ventures, but I was reading that you had all kind of put in your own capital to get started and...
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get kind of to this point, six months in, seven months in. What did you need to invest into the brand to get to this point? And how were you thinking about capital from the beginning? Yeah.
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Sure. So I think early on it was getting a runway to getting it to a proof of concept to be able to get an investor in. Sometimes, depending on the skill sets in the team, that can be a lot more cost effective. There may be things that people can actually do. And it's a good consideration for who you're founding with, depending on what way you want to go down.
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If you're self-funding and you know that design is critical, brand is critical, maybe you bring in a graphic designer, a really strong creative lead as that founding team, similar to sales getting that. So maybe you bring in a strong salesperson. So I think that's always something to consider as well, depending on how you get there. We actually raised with Unilever prior to launching. So we announced it.
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in January, but it was pre-seed investment. So that was based off all the work that we had done to date, the formulations, the product, obviously, and all the vessels they'd seen, smelled, touched, felt, gone through intense R&D that the products do what they say they're going to do. But, yes, so that's definitely helped and accelerated our launch.
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Absolutely. That's so exciting. Congratulations, by the way. I guess for you, it's like old news since that happened seven months ago. But for everyone else who's just seen the news, congratulations. It's very exciting to read about it. So how did it go then for fundraising? Like you just kind of knocked on their door specifically, or you started knocking on hundreds of doors to have these conversations? And was it you leading the fundraising process or someone else in the
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Yeah, I would say it was definitely a collective collaborative effort. It was led predominantly by Jeremy and Sarah in our business at different phases than it was probably led by other people, depending on where their piece was. In terms of Unilever, look, we were really surprised, pleasantly surprised and very happy. We were working with a company called Lempary Wells and they facilitated the introduction process.
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They'd previously, I believe, worked with other Australian brands to help them gain that funding and, yeah, early investment. So, like, is that company, what was it called, sorry? It says Lemperry Wells. Lemperry Wells. Is that like a broker for investors? Like, what's it, like, what is that even called?
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There are brokers, definitely. So Lamperewells Capital, which is head by Alice Wells, and she does quite a lot of the deal making there, they can do quite a few numerous different things. Traditionally, Lamperewells are a leading global investment bank in consumer M&A.
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Ah, very cool. That's so interesting. Okay. So you start the process of fundraising, you successfully raise, you are then focused on your launch, I imagine. So what were you doing kind of in the lead up to launch already being a VC backed business at that point? So I think that the thing with our mentality too, is we're very performance orientated.
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coming from, you know, some self-funded brands as well. Like a dollar has to work as hard as that dollar can work. So coming up to the launch, it was looking at just getting that timing right in when we could hire. We couldn't hire too early. We couldn't hire too late. A lot of the runway to launch was definitely getting market ready. So everything from, you know, brand assets, website,
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and logistics is a really fun space of business to be in at the moment, especially during the COVID period. So we launched about six months later than we wanted to. So that was where a lot of our key focus was. We ended up launching mid last year and it was just very much getting everything ready, even from collateral, like your mailer bags, what 3PL are we going to use? Are we going to use a 3PL market analysis, negotiating all of our contracts with different stakeholders?
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Who do we have within the business, but then who do we need outside of the business and who are we comfortable with and who do we have confidence in as an agency partner or as a small sole trader to kind of help us hit our goals. So that was definitely where we're spending a lot of our time. And then also a corporate internal, we're setting up a new business.
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So there's everything that goes with that, like HR documents, you know, brand guidelines, bringing people on board. What is our culture? What are our brand values? What do we expect? I'm a big believer in, you know, clearly communicating what is expected in an environment so that everyone has the opportunity to succeed. And then there's hiring. So it's like, who, what head counter are we hiring? Who do we need to hire? And at what point and where is that critical?
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process it's searching and looking for talent and again your your team is especially in the early days where it's just a few of you so so so integral to bringing the brand to life so that was yeah quite a bit of my time last year
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Who did you kind of, what was your first hires to actually kind of launch the brand? Like, was it marketing? Was it performance, paid specialists? Even though I guess one of your co-founders has that background, like who were the people who you needed to really get it out there? I was quite lucky that during my career, I've had a lot of exposure to all different parties.
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indexing in marketing, advertising and branding. So that helped when we came to look at, okay, what do we need from a marketing perspective? But we did need a really strong, solid, creative lead that I could kind of work with, bounce off, not spend days writing briefs and sending iterations of changes and losing kind of all of that time. So we had to be in a really good operating rhythm. And thankfully, earlier on in the process of being introduced to Sharni,
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who is our now creative lead and did all those wonderful sweat house things that you saw yesterday. And she was working with us in a freelance capacity. She'd recently gone freelance and that was her intention of what she wanted to do as a business.
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And then when it came to doing our corporate branding, which I think is really important, by the way, especially if you want to attract talent and, you know, inspire people. So rather than a boring LinkedIn post, I was like, okay, let's write some cool copy. We did some fun gifts. And as we were putting the rollout for a graphic designer, she kind of tapped me on the shoulder and she was like,
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So can I like apply for this? And I was like, oh, I thought you'd never ask. So that was a big win. The heavens aligned. Literally. And I didn't want to put any pressure on her either. She just started doing her freelance after working as a creative lead and had a really big Australian beauty brand and had big teams. And so it was just really nice. Like we're both kind of like, do you want to?
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And she was like, yeah, I mean. Dancing around the idea. Will you be my graphic designer? Literally. Cute. I love that. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so you hired a really strong creative lead who could kind of help you with the marketing launch, social media, events, activations, look really sleek and professional at every touch point, emails, website. Packaging. Mailers. Packaging. Yes. Packaging. Absolutely. Packaging.
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I mean, she's ticking all those boxes. Everything looks very schmick. Thank you. How does the launch go?
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What, like, what were you, what were you doing that was working to really get the word out there at the very beginning? Back at launch now. I'm like, oh my God, what did we do? It's like the whiplash. So there's, so within that, we then also, we did another critical hire, which was Emily and she's in affiliate, our head of affiliate and influencers, which she has a lot of experience in there too.
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And then we also hired Anna, who's content and video editor. So we knew and I knew from the very beginning, especially with my publishing background, that I want Strand to be more of a publisher mindset. I wanted to be very...
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love creative I almost want and we are bringing to life our own mini creative studio within the brand and at first in the early days we have to be quite tight with our comms and what we're talking about we only get you know x amount of opportunity to make an impact or to talk to somebody so you've got to keep it very tight and even if you think you're being repetitive just come back and that's why solid comms guidelines are so important because it stops you from
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over here. I was like, no. Yeah. Let's go over here. And then that's shiny. Let's go over there. Story of my life. And it's like, come back, come back. You've got to keep it, you know, what's integral to your brand. So around launch, we had this team, which is fantastic internally. So content creation is super important. And then we also have a really strong PR partner. So I've worked with Jesse from Hive previously on a few different things. And we've just got a really great working relationship, which I love.
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So around the launch, I'm always mindful that we have to, I guess, punch it by our way. We have to look and appear so much bigger than what we probably are. So we've got our work set out for us. And I think the way that brands can do that effectively and play in arenas that, you know, probably much bigger than they are and have brands that are much bigger than they are in them is to be creative.
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And the more creative that you can be and the more clever you can be, the more that it will hit, the more that it will resonate, the more cut through that you will get. And it's easy to say, it's sometimes a lot harder to execute, but we always as a team kind of come back to that and really try and challenge it. So around our launch period, we had a few delays and we ended up just launching with the shampoo because it was critical to get to launch at this point. But it ended up working really well because it meant that we could have this hero moment.
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with the shampoo and really spotlight it. Emily, with her experience with influencers, had worked with a lot of influencers who did this really good ROI. And that was during the early days of, or earlier days of performance media and influencer really working. So we tested say one or two, but then the other was we really honed in on beauty authorities. So authorities in our nation.
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And I always look at things, whether it be in campaigns, marketing strategy, even in business, there's like this theory, and I probably won't recite it right, but it's about the domino effect. Like, what is that one domino that you can push and it will then influence all the others?
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So when we were going to market, it's like we don't have infinite budget, we don't have infinite resources to make impact. So who do we need to get buy-in from really early on? And if we get their buy-in and if we know that they love our brand and there will be advocates for our brand and they trust our product, that will then make any conversation or any marketing activity that we do next a lot easier or compound and have a lot more weight and social proofing to it. So it went really hard.
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with specific authorities, we worked with them on a longer period because it was still what I would consider quite expensive. So rather than just a once off, it was, you know, a three-month period and that was great from a cost positioning. It also meant that, like, you were both partnering.
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there was a lot more depth to the relationship and then leaning in and getting to understand the brand. And we work for people too that we know don't do much pay to play unless they genuinely love the brand. So their audience also know that of them as well. So then they know that if they're saying they love it and they want to do it, yes, they need to make an income, but they wouldn't do it if they didn't like it or if it didn't work or if it didn't do what they're saying. And one person that we went with locally here was Hannah English, for example,
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and she's a pharmaceutical scientist. She's incredibly clever, and she's great at educating her audience, and she shares so much knowledge.
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on her channel about the science and the performance. And she was really integral to having buy-in early because that helped with the credentials of our brand as, you know, a serious science brand, even though we are bold and fun and playful and cheeky and trying to remove the stigma of the category, we work and the products work. So that was, I guess, the launch plan. And we did it over three months. So we went shampoo, went kind of hard, heavy on a particular comms messaging platform.
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Then we went in with the serum and then we went through with the shampoo and conditioner. So by phasing those product launches, it helped keep newness. It helped keep buzz over that kind of three to four month period, which I think was part of the reason why we had so much success with press. But then the other part was it was actually interesting and all of the kind of R&D that we've done before in the white space.
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As part of that with Hannah, I think it was the Serum Lodge, so this was the second or the third month, we did a skinification of hair virtual forum.
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So back in my advertising days, a way that we would bring, you know, potential clients in, I'd say like a Vogue, is you would always invest in research pieces. So what research piece do they potentially not get access to that's going to be really meaningful, that's going to help influence how they connect with their consumers in that kind of marketing capacity? And on a really small level, I was like, let's do that with the skinification of hair.
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We know that digital online editors, they have SEO, they want to know where trends are going. They also have KPIs within their role of what kind of content they're putting out, not just what's like, you know, cool or trending at the moment. So we went in and quantified all of the scalp and the scalp data. You know, I think scalp detox was up 350% as an SEO term.
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Quite a lot of things that were working that skinification of hair and we put it on an invite. We sent it to them and invited them to come and learn more with Hannah English, myself and Phoebe from the blow so that we could have a roundtable discussion on that. And it got a great turnout. The picker was pretty good. But then this year in.
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I think January, Princhess predicts put out the crown care as one of the big ones and the skinification of hair. And all of a sudden, all these press are calling our PR and they're like, is Megan available to come in and talk about this? So it was maybe a bit early for them when it first happened, but it put and positioned us as a thought leader in the category in the space.
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Oh, I love that. Yeah, a very long-term play there, but very worth it. I love that. That's so interesting. I had a question. What was it? Oh, yeah. So, you know, obviously you're a funded brand. Your budget looks different to a bootstrap brand, and I know that we have a lot of listeners who are early stage. They're kind of solo founders. They're bootstrapping, and I'm wondering, like, when they listen to you speak and when they're listening to your story, if you were –
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doing this business as a bootstrapped founder and you didn't have kind of a lot of budget to do all the things, what would you focus if you had to focus on just doubling down on one thing? Like, would it be the influencer side or would it be the PR side or what would you kind of go really hard on if you were kind of doing it solo? It's really tricky because in the marketing mix, each channel compounds on
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on each channel. So you kind of almost need to have every channel on, but in saying that, that's not always possible. So you need to focus your attention. I think it's very specific to the business, the category and what they're doing. But I always look at things as like, what's your high return value and hours and what's your low return value and hours. I think a lot of like bootstrap business can get really obsessed with Instagram, for instance. And it's like, I need to be on Instagram. I need to be posting four or five times a day,
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And then the amount of money that's going into managing that content and that's doing that and the people to trauma, it's like, is that actually giving you a return? Is that shifting the dial? Like, is it actually that if you took all those hours that you were doing that, could you go into retails, get sales and then use that money to kind of push into that? Things like the virtual event that we did.
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Outside of the soft costs of obviously, you know, designing an invite, our PR agency, organising the guest list, that was cheap. That was free. It was a virtual event, but it was using, I guess, my positioning and our relationships as thought leaders to add value. So it's like, I think...
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If you're starting a brand, it's like, okay, where can you do an exchange to add value? Three Warriors, the other business that I'm in, is still self-funded, bootstrapped for years, up until last year was still packing orders in the bottom of the house. Like we get creative. And Corbin as a founder has such an incredible story and has incredible relationships with people that he gets a lot of in return just through his networking and his relationships.
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Influencers, I think, are an important part of the mix. They can be very expensive and the environment of gifting in exchange for product seems to have changed quite a lot, that there's generally a payment needed, even if it's just you want someone to review it.
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I think I would go really tight on my community, um, friends, family, networks, my own personal brand, providing value, uh, education, and just looking at ways that you can, you know, just get super creative. I still, this example always plays out in my mind. Um,
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I think it was Zoe Foster Blake when she launched GoTo sent the press release with everyone and stuck $5 on it and said, okay, if you have time doing this, now go buy yourself a coffee. I love that. That's great. I haven't heard that one before. Really clever and just like creative. So even though we do have funding, we still try and think in this mindset because our funding is there to help.
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byproduct to put it in stores overseas. It's not like an infinite amount and headcount also, obviously, as we're investing in all these channels. So still with any of our marketing, I think always have that bootstrap mindset. Make brand loyalists. I've seen that work so well with Three Warriors. Corbs, bless him, was like literally just him in that business for four years.
31:54
wearing every hat and he would DM, you know, and just chat to people wearing the brand. And as part of that, Sonia Kruger started wearing it because he sent it to her makeup artist. So I knew Kruger wore the brand for years, loved it. We get a call from Sonia's manager, Lucy. She's like, Sonia loves your brand. She can't stop talking about it. She's been wearing it for years. Like, can you work together? And we're like,
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We don't think we can afford to work with you as flattered as we are. And she's like, no, she just really loves your brand and wants to make it work. We've now been working with Sonia Kruger in a formal capacity for a year and a half. Our brand has grown significantly. And because Sonia is such a diehard loyalist of the brand, she's like a salesperson. She goes into salons and she's like, oh, you should definitely stop this. And so does her manager, Lucy.
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Like it's incredible. And I think those kind of relationships, whether they're paid or they're organic, will shift the dial because they love you. They love your brand. They're buying it and they genuinely want to be on your team. It's very, very different to if you're paying somebody and they're like, okay, here's my one frame. That's my deliverable.
33:05
catch. Yep. Yes. Yes. Very different. Yeah. I love this. I feel like the two takeaways that we just really need to like drill home here is number one, figure out the things that you think are, you think you're doing that you think are important, but actually aren't driving those results and switch that to being, where are you getting results and triple, triple, triple down on what that is, whether that's pounding the pavement to get retailers instead of focusing on
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Instagram or TikTok content that's not reaching any eyeballs or whether it's, you know, markets and speaking to customers and knowing that when you're there doing a demo, you can get someone to be excited and buy your brand versus, you know, something that isn't driving results. And secondly, digging into who your VIP customers are, find out who loves your brand. Find out who is excited and could potentially be a partner in a bigger capacity. I love that. That's two great
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takeaways thank you so much my pleasure you summarize it perfectly love that I needed to like summarize it for myself I feel like I also needed to hear that because I can be guilty of doing the things that aren't driving the results but thinking that it's still important which it is but as a solo founder and someone who's bootstrapping a brand you just have to make you can't do it and be like you can't do it all yeah so it's like what is going to shift the dark what's going to be your domino
34:34
Whether it be that day, that week, that project. What is the domino? Yeah. Yes. Oh, I love that. What's the domino? That's a very good one. I'm going to put that on a post-it. Okay, something else I wanted to talk about, and I know we're kind of coming up on time, so I'm just going to – we can touch on this quickly, is the event you hosted yesterday. It was a beautiful activation. You had so many nice moments within the activation overall, and we were talking about this before we started recording around how –
35:04
you know, you were taking this kind of lean approach to creating this activation. Activations in today's world are expensive, but your approach was, well, let's bring in other female founders and kind of collab together to, you know, mix resources, I guess, and put on this amazing thing. And so I'd love to just hear a little bit about your strategy and tell us about that activation. Yeah.
35:31
Definitely. I think there's so much power in collaboration. In my past life, I would work on events for publishers, like Gourmet Traveler Restaurant of the Year or Vote Codes, and we would sell sponsorships to advertisers. They would all come in and they would have their spaces and it would be activated on numerous different platforms. And towards the end of last year, I was just like, why are brands not doing that together?
35:55
but just then actively being responsible for the hard costs. There's so many, again, punching above our weight, trying to be much bigger than what we are. There's so many things and so many creative ideas and so many reasons why we want to have meaningful interaction with our community, with our customers, with press, with creators. But again, it's expensive and you see people doing it and you're like, oh, wow.
36:20
like the standard is pretty high too. So it can be quite intimidating. So I just got thinking about this idea called Sweat House.
36:29
wouldn't it be cool if we did something really fresh around the year when we got started we got moving and you go in you just have just a little feel-good workout get the endorphins you come through you get your roots freshed up and you know what else lives in in your day that looks like that and I'm a huge beauty consumer I use lots of different brands and at different points throughout my day that I kind of interact with them.
36:52
And then I have this beautiful relationship with Priscilla from Banging Body and Kira Rumble from Habitual Beauty. And we'll share, support each other, you know, give interest here or there when we need to. And I was like, well, they're part of my day. I use banging in the shower. I use Habitual. I love their marine collagen. I was like, why can't this exist? And then I was like, well, naturally, it's outside. It's summer in Australia. You must wear your SPF. It's a non-negotiable. So then I thought it may be like,
37:22
Um, and I was like, okay, well, why don't we all get together? I kind of pitched them. I actually did a pitch deck of what my idea was, what the concept, what the opportunity for them was and why they should buy in. So I first caught up with, for dinner with Priscilla, you know, kind of just said, look, would this be interesting? Love it. Absolutely love it. And I was like, okay, cool. I'll follow through with the pitch deck. And I made it look really pretty. It's really important to have very, very good looking decks. Yeah.
37:51
And then we went out to a few of the other brands. We all got together and we're like, okay, what do you want out of this? Like what's really important for your brand? How can we activate it? A fabulous PR partner, Hive, facilitated and helped bring it all to life. And that's where we narrowed it down. But the key reason for this, well, actually there was a few, but it was really looking at marketing efficiencies. So if we all work together, we can pull resourcing
38:19
We have a design lead. We do it under a sweat house. So it's very even for each brand to be involved. It's not necessarily a lead brand, even though we're leading it in terms of execution deliverables and implementation.
38:31
which again, you know, some of the brands that we went to, like at Bangin, is a lot more established than we are. They have a huge EDM database, a huge community. So that was a little bit of, you know, the exchange. It's like, okay, if you're going to come in and do this, we'll do the creative legwork. And I also know they're drowning and they're so busy at the moment and have heaps going on. So it's like making it easy for them just to say yes as well and removing friction and removing hurdles. Yeah.
38:56
So that's what we said. We'll take it on. We'll come up with a concept. We'll come up with the idea, you know, how executed the different touch points. We just want your buy-in and then your activation to help facilitate. So we did it and we will continue to do it and looking at it as a full marketing concept. So we did a pre-swept consumer competition, which we drove to an email database sign-up. So each brand shared it on all of their socials.
39:22
They shared it on their EDM marketing list. This means we have a pooled reach across the four brands. If we were to go to a publisher or if we'll go to somebody to pay for that type of access or that exposure, it wouldn't be feasible. Like we couldn't afford to do that. But as a collective, we can all share. And so we did that. We have the consumer comp and then we had the activation, which was amazing. And to do an activation, look, you're looking at, if you're lucky, $50,000 for something of that calibre.
39:52
by us working together, we're able to then share those costs because it was all cohesively styled, cohesively branded. It was very clear what was, you know, shared costs and what we're doing there. Hive, our PR partner, also did a fabulous job of, you know, reaching out to some other sponsors to help contribute to the event. That meant that we could have
40:12
think we had around 45 people come through yesterday in four different sessions throughout the day and experience this phenomenal, I guess, moment, day, a house that we all wanted to stay and live in. Yes, we all wanted to move in immediately. How many bottles of...
40:32
shampoo we need to sell for something like that but I'll put it on a vision board but and then yeah and then within that it's obviously the group activity and then there was like a nice little labyrinth where you could explore and you went to AB and they did a skin check they obviously went through the different product ranging you came to strand and we did a dry blow bar using the lactic acid as a product breakdown from the serum you walked through to a habitual beauty actually a
41:02
When you have these beautiful marine collagen smoothies. And then when you go outside to Bang & Body, they had these lymphatic drainage massage stations. And, you know, even for Bang & It was really important that they were teaching people how to do it rather than having it done to them. So you went away and you're like, oh, I learned something. Like that's really cool. Yeah, I actually did feel that. I had that exact reaction. Oh, that was interesting. I'm glad I know how to do that now.
41:29
Because it's like you can add value in so many ways. And so many people, I think, particularly in media, they're really interesting people. And they're really inquisitive. They really want to learn things. So it's helping to facilitate that journey as well, which I think makes those moments more meaningful. We had the brand founders there, myself and Kira, unfortunately Priscilla, or not unfortunately for her, I guess, was on her honeymoons.
41:54
in Europe. So she's having a great time. But Kira and I were there, we got to, you know, chat to people. And you know, what do you love about this? What do you not love? What are you loving at the moment? And just hear and experience things together. So that was fantastic and that was really meaningful. And then there's obviously all the content that will come from it, that all the brands have been able to capture, which again, we then put through all of our different marketing channels.
42:19
We're now digging a little bit deeper and this will help form our comms plan for the next month. These reasons to sweat, what sweat means for dandruff, how do you manage sebum, and then going a little bit deeper even to the root refresh and how you use that product. And now we've got content to help support it, messaging to help support it, but then buy-in, which we can then, I guess, continue to reinforce over the next few weeks for the brand positioning in that space.
42:49
Gosh, I just love it. And I love like, I mean, obviously so much went into this event, but what I also love is the takeaway that it doesn't have to be this big $50,000 event. You can also be thinking, you know, how can I do this on a small scale? How can I get together some other female founders locally in my area and host a beautiful tea party or brunch or, you know, massage parlor or whatever it might be that's complimentary and suitable to all brands involved and still.
43:17
get some of this amazing content and reach and exposure and inviting interesting influencers and editors and people in the media space to come along and experience your brand, but just on a smaller level. Or even things like just IG collab posts, finding brands, doing a bundle, putting a giveaway together, whatever it might be. I think the takeaway here is you can do this at any level and with any budget, truly, but
43:43
And it's just about thinking, like putting your collaboration hat on and being like, what can I come up with? Like, what's a creative idea that I can do? And maybe you start by thinking really big and then being like, okay, and how can I simplify that and do it on a $0 budget or $1,000 budget or whatever it might be? Definitely. And even just looking at what's in your toolkit, it doesn't have to be money.
44:05
helps, but are you a great graphic designer? Do you have a really good network? And then if you're looking at like, what do I need to make this really successful, who is somebody who has something that you don't have that you could exchange? It's like, Hey, you might not have this at the moment, but I do. Let's do this together. We've got, I'm not sure when this will go live, but we have a partnership coming up with Kira Rumble from habitual for Three Warriors.
44:31
The exchange there is Kira came down to Tassie, was in our photographs, we paid for all the shoot, we'll give her some for her brand, and then we're also hosting a consumer comp that Three Warriors as a brand is going to pay for and then share it with her brand. So that was the exchange there. It was like Kira gave her time and she's also given her platform, and then in return,
44:54
Obviously, there's a friendship and, you know, it was that mutual wanting to support. But that was what was in the toolkit. It's like, well, we can do it, you know, this giveaway, which is going to be an amazing trip to go to Tasmania. And then, Kira, you've just visited. You were coming down anyway. Let's do a shoot and then we'll do all of this marketing investment. Your brand can then utilize and plug into that. She's heavily pregnant and about to have a baby.
45:16
Amazing. She's like, okay, my next campaign's done. I can, baby. So yeah, I think the key thing is also what tools do you have that exist outside of just your budget? What is your kind of key piece of advice that you can leave us with? I would always just say just always show up. So often I put myself in rooms, environments, places that my imposter syndrome would think, oh, you can't really.
45:45
deserve to be there or, oh, that's a bit intimidating. Um, but just, yeah, always showing up. And it's like, if you just keep putting that one foot in front of the other, and if you say you are that, if you say I am a beauty founder and that's how I'm going to behave and that's what I'm going to show up as. And that's what I'm going to do. The universe responds. Um, and it just might be tipping away at it. And it's like, what little skillsets do I need over the years to amass to get there? Yeah. That's how I kind of always look at things.
46:15
It's like just there's something in it, a skill or something from every experience you're going through and take it into your toolkit and just one foot in front of the other. Absolutely. Show up, chip away, one foot in front of the other. I love that.
46:31
Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
46:56
And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
47:18
As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.
47:34
Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
47:58
And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
48:21
As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.